The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is certainly an amazing open world RPG and for the most part, it’s extremely well optimised and runs well with virtually any decent CPU. The folks over at Digital Foundry, have provided a detailed CPU Benchmark test which can be viewed below:

The first section of the video demonstrates how the same CPU can still drive the Titan X to almost the same degree.

But once we hit 01:12 – a tour of Novigrad City on horseback… well, then we see some big changes. This area can hit 80% utilisation across all eight threads on a Core i7 4790K! The less powerful the CPU here, the more CPU stutter you encounter. The G3258 – overclocked to 4.5GHz – doesn’t work out too well.

Also, check out the performance of the FX-6300 and FX-8350 starting from 01:26. In the initial cut-scenes they fall a little short of the Core i3 and i5, but once we hit the heavy Novigrad area, they compete very nicely – the FX 6300 moves ahead of the i3, while the FX 8350 is very close to the 4690K.

So, is this CPU stutter found in the Novigrad stress test a cause for concern? Well, not really. Most in-game stutter is caused when the CPU – not the GPU – is the bottleneck (and that’s what we are testing here). As long as you pair your more budget-orientated CPU with an appropriate GPU, you’ll hit the GPU limit first – and typically that doesn’t cause stutter. And in the case of The Witcher 3, most of the game is GPU-limited (as seen in the first couple of cut-scenes tested here). With that final stress test scene, you’ll note that the 4790K is well-matched with the Titan X, the CPU isn’t really the bottleneck and thus the latencies are much more consistent.

Across all three scenes, the benchmarks work out as follows (low/avg) but do check out the CPU stress test scene to get a better idea of latency and performance under load. A benchmark sums up performance with a single number, but real-life can be a bit more complicated than that:

The Witcher 3 is available for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. We will bring you any new information on The Witcher 3 as soon as it becomes available. Be sure to check out our previous coverage for more information on The Witcher 3, here and here.

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